poet at lunch

today is a holiday and teachers across the city had the day off, so i had lunch with a teacher friend of mine. we were sitting in a little veggie cafe when a woman came in and sat down at the table next to us, on the same side as my friend. before she was even in her seat, i recognized her. mary karr. i spent a semester in a class she taught years ago, when she wore only shades of purple and some black, with knee boots and dramatic scarves. now, maybe it wasn't her. what would she be doing in brooklyn at lunch time, but nobody else really looks like mary karr. she's more than fifty but still has something about her that makes you want to look at her. she's compelling. equipped with limited words i'd say she's pretty, but there's something about her that most woman who are "pretty" don't have. i'll probably never figure it out, but that's okay because mary karr isn't important because she's pretty. she's a very good poet. a wrangler of words and sounds and images.

she never got the right recognition as a poet i think, but that doesn't matter, either, because in the mid nineties she wrote this book, liar's club, which is a memoir from her little girl times, and folks went mad for it. now, i like memoirs but i'm not very patient with what mary would call "bullshit", which is what oozes in and out of so many memoirs these days, but i like her book very much. she has two other memoirs, cherry, which i read and liked just fine, and lit, which i haven't read and may not. but the thing about mary karr is that she's had the sort of life people write memoirs about but she's also had a good ear and a sense of the rhythm of language and the way words create snapshots.

mary karr always presented herself in class as this poor dumb cracker girl from texas who didn't know a thing about much. a self-deprecating badass. one of those small dogs who will go after anything. a rabbit. a deer. another dog. an escaped tiger. crazed for the fight. i used to think this was a front, something she did for the class, for the public. but she has not stopped being in the middle of fights. it's not for show. folks who don't like her writing get upset maybe by her approach to it. flowery silliness gets in the way and she doesn't find room for it. and maybe you think that means things will be stripped down and awful. poetry that's functional is just a list. but not her poetry. here's a little sample of what folks miss when they think her words will be too plain.

Etching of the Plague Years
by Mary Karr

In the valley of your art history book,
the corpses stack in the back of a cart
drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles
show its considerable weight.

He does this often. His velvet nostrils
flare to indicate the stench.

It’s the smell you catch after class
while descending a urine-soaked
subway stair on a summer night
in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive:
the odor of dead flowers, fear
multiplied a thousand times.

The train door’s hiss
seals you inside with a frail boy
swaying from a silver hoop.
He coughs in your direction, his eyes
are burn holes in his face.

Back in the fourteenth-century print
lying in your lap, a hand
white as an orchid has sprouted
from the pyramid of flesh.
It claws the smoky air.

Were it not for that,
the cart might carry green cordwood
(the human body knobby and unplaned).

Wrap your fingers around your neck
and feel the stony glands.
Count the holes in your belt loop
for lost weight.

In the black unfurling glass,
study the hard planes of your face.

Compare it to the prom picture
in your wallet, the orchid
pinned to your chest like a spider.

Think of the flames
at your high school bonfire
licking the black sky, ashes rising,
innumerable stars. The fingers that wove
with your fingers
have somehow turned to bone.

The subway shudders between dark and light.
The ox plods across the page.

Think of everyone
you ever loved: the boy
who gets off at your stop
is a faint ideogram for each.

Offer him your hand.
Help him climb the stair.

All This and More
by Mary Karr

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include
a factory line where molten lead
spilled into mouths held wide,

no electric drill spiraling screws
into hands and feet, nor giant pliers
to lower you into simmering vats.

Instead, a circle of light
opened on your stuffed armchair,
whose chintz orchids did not boil and change,

and the Devil adjusted
your new spiked antennae
almost delicately, with claws curled

and lacquered black, before he spread
his leather wings to leap
into the acid-green sky.

So your head became a tv hull,
a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger
sloppy at the mouth

and swollen at the joints
enacted your days in sinuous
slow motion, your lines delivered

with a mocking sneer. Sometimes
the frame froze, reversed, began
again: the red eyes of a friend

you cursed, your girl child cowered
behind the drapes, parents alive again
and puzzled by this new form. That’s why

you clawed your way back to this life.